Box Releases Free Content Platform Tools

By Adrian Bridgwater, March 28, 2014

Box View and Metadata arrive during Box Dev programmer conference

Online file sharing and cloud content management specialist Box has used its Box Dev programmer conference to release Box View and Metadata, two new free technologies designed to enable developers to build content-centric applications.

Box View technology converts PDF and Office documents into embeddable HTML. Developers that leverage Box View can build what the company wants us to call "immersive experiences" around content, including custom document viewers for web and mobile platforms.

"Every business in the world today is transitioning from legacy solutions to cloud services that help their workforce be more agile, collaborative, and competitive," said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO at Box. "This presents a significant market opportunity for entrepreneurs and developers to create a new generation of software."

Levie notes that more than 35,000 developers are building services on the Box platform today and that every month, 1 billion third-party API calls are made to the Box platform.

Box has also open sourced viewer.js, a client-side library for rendering and interacting with Box View documents. Developers can create animations and collect usage and data analytics with viewer.js when they use it.

Introduced as a private beta at BoxWorks 2013, Metadata is now available to all developers as a beta and is integrated with Box's iOS, Android, and Windows SDKs. Part of the Box Content API, Metadata allows developers to attach customizable data to unstructured content stored on Box in order to assign workflows around that content and create repeatable business processes.

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